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As a renowned scientific-research university and medical center, UCSF has long teamed with pharmaceutical companies to develop drugs and diagnostics. But even as the institution has ramped up its commercial partnerships, it has not paid as much attention to medical devices, an industry that has spawned life-saving inventions such as pacemakers, artificial joints, replacement heart valves and surgical robots.

And UCSF has fallen behind local competitors Stanford University, which has run a program dedicated to medical-device inventions since 2001, and the Fogarty Institute for Innovation in Mountain View, which helps physicians and business professionals bring devices and other therapies to market.

"We've neglected a very major part of medical creativity and innovation," said Dr. Regis Kelly, who has helped lead the creation of the Rosenman Institute.

Kelly likens the program to another he directs: the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences, or QB3, a network of Northern California labs where biologists do research, patent discoveries and start spin-off companies.

The Rosenman Institute, which is also being led by UCSF's bioengineering and surgery departments, will connect faculty from inside and outside the university with a network of volunteers who know how to commercialize devices: engineers, regulatory experts, clinical-trial designers, intellectual property attorneys and marketing specialists. A dedicated laboratory is in the works.

"It's tremendous to have more institutions like UCSF, which has a phenomenal reputation in the biotech industry around here, stepping into the device realm," said Brent Ahrens, who invests in medical-device companies as general partner at venture capital firm Canaan Partners. He is not involved with the Rosenman Institute.

But creating a commercially successful medical device is not easy, even with a team of interdisciplinary minds.

Compared with drugs, which are expected to drive $1 trillion in worldwide sales this year, the global market for medical devices is about $330 billion. And lower profits can make it hard to attract investors.

"Devices just don't have the same kind of profit level that drugs do over the course of time," Ahrens said.

The industry's growth is also slowing, analysts say, in part because medical device makers now must pay a 2.3 percent tax on sales under the Affordable Care Act. In addition, companies have complained that the Food and Drug Administration has a slow and flawed approach to clearing devices for sale, a process the agency says it is reviewing.

Ahrens said medical device makers are now used to the tightened regulatory atmosphere, but will still have to invest in proving their inventions are effective and safe before they can sell them to the public or become acquired by another company.

That's the kind of assistance that the Rosenman Institute will be able to provide, said Christine Winoto, who is assistant director at QB3 and helping lead the Rosenman Institute.

The program is named after her late husband, Daniel Rosenman, who died in August after a 25-year career in which he invented several medical tools and founded BioCardia, a San Carlos maker of devices that prevent heart failure. After his death, Rosenman's friends volunteered to help start and serve as advisers for the center.

"When you're a surgeon, you tend to see what needs to be done but you're in a clinic, you're not an engineer," Winoto said.

Lee, the surgeon, hopes the Rosenman Institute will help him develop his idea for a device that will prevent bedsores. Commercialization "used to be kind of a dirty word" in academia, he said, but no longer.

"If you can't commercialize something, no matter how good your product is," he said, "it'll never get to a patient."